Thomas M. Disch (5 page)

Father Bryce’s first reaction was simply relief to know the extent of the pain he would have to bear and to know that it was bearable. It was not as bad as he’d feared, nothing like the pain of a dentist’s drill, which the instrument in Wolf’s hand so much resembled. It couldn’t be shrugged away or ignored, but it was not such a pain as the Jesuits knew at the hands of the Hurons (or, for that matter, the Cathars at the hands of the Inquisition).

“Tattoos do things to people,” Wolf observed, keeping his eye fixed on the slow progress of the needle as it traced a line of ink and blood across Father Bryce’s flesh. “They get changed. Not just in the way that’s obvious.

Like they say, what happens is more than skindeep.”

Father Bryce flinched as the needle hit a nerve that caused the dull pain to flare, momentarily, into something bright and intense. He began to sweat.

“You become a different person,” Wolf went on coolly. “I’ve seen it happen to lots of guys. Chicks, too. Not always. Some guys get tattooed the way they go to work where their dads went to work. Like, it’s part of the job description. But you’re not that kind, I knew that even before you come in.

Not with a design like you were asking for.

“Some designs are like doorways, you know what I mean? They’re like there’s something inside of you that can’t get out until the tattoo is there, and the tattoo lets it out. That’s how it was for me, man. Five years ago, you know what I was doing? I was a fuckin’ CPA. I shit you not. A tax accountant for a big company. So what happened was I went with a buddy of mine who had this bike that’s like a toy for weekends, and we drove to this rally in Wisconsin, and there was this tattooist there working out of a Winnebago. We got stewed and then we got tattooed. I got a wolf, the head of a wolf, on my shoulder, where I figured no one would see. But
I
saw it. And I knew the person with the tattoo was not the same person who put on the business suit and commuted to work every day. And gradually Wolf, the person with the tattoo, took charge. The other way of looking at it—my wife’s way— was that booze took charge. But really the booze was like a switch, or the stuff Dr.

Jekyll drinks in the movie when he wants to become Mr. Hyde. It sort of greased the hinges on the door. But the tattoo was the doorway.”

Wolf put down the tattoo gun, took a Kleenex from a box on the counter, and dabbed blood from the zigzagging line of Satan’s teeth. “How’s it going?

Startin’ to get into it?”

Father Bryce nodded. He fixed his eyes on the filament of the bulb overhead and tried to will his mind into the same state of whited-out blankness.

The pain began again almost at once, and Wolf went on: “I got a theory.

It goes along with why I called this place Knightriders, which is not because of the movie. It’s to do with armor. This all comes out of another time I was getting tattooed, when I was dropping acid and I got this idea that the tattoos was like a coat of armor. I was close to having full coverage by then.

It wasn’t like the tats was some kind of bulletproof protection—there’s guys who had that idea, but most of ‘em are dead—it was more like the knight is riding the horse, and armor is riding the knight. Like the armor is some kind of alien that takes over what you do. Like the tattoos get to be in charge.

They
ride
us. Can you dig that, Damon?

“Damon?”

Father Bryce nodded once, he could dig it, and then, as the vomit he’d been trying to make himself swallow spilled down across his cheek, he fainted dead away.

IV

Silvanus de Roquefort, Bishop of Rodez and Montpellier-le-Vieux, was attired with unusual splendor to celebrate the Feast of Saint Macanus, which falls on the second of January, which was also the anniversary of his consecration. Ergo, all the pomp. But a more practical purpose was served by the layers of vestments in which he was encased—alb, tunicle, chasuble, and pallium, to mention only those that served to keep out the chill—for it was unusually cold in the abbey church of Notre Dame de Gevaudon. In the morning hours the church lay within the shadow of the escarpments of the fortress of Montpellier-le-Vieux, and only the dead who were interred there—many de Roqueforts among them—could have taken comfort in their surroundings. For the larger part of the congregation, who must stand beyond the altar screen in the as-yet-uncompleted nave, beneath a canopy of dripping rushes, there could be little sense of a holiday being celebrated—the third within eight days—but only of a mortification to be endured. As he ascended the pulpit to deliver his homily, the Bishop could not resist feeling a certain satisfaction in the evident misery of those assembled before him, for their presence attested eloquently to the power that had brought them here so much against the grain of their own fleshly will—the conjoint power of the Bishop de Roquefort and of Holy Mother Church.

“My dear children,” the Bishop began, speaking not in Latin but in the language of his listeners, “the flesh is evil. In that matter the heretics among you are correct. Whether they go by the name of Cathars, or Albigensians, or Waldensians, heretics know that much. Heresy has a nose, and it can smell corruption. For what is our flesh but meat, and what does meat do after only a little while? It decays, it rots, it becomes a lodging house for maggots. You will all die—the fat merchant and squinch-eyed lime-burner, the gravid mother and the nursing child, priest and prince and prisoner—none will be spared, all will become dead meat, a feast for worms, a noxious thing that must be buried where it can’t be seen or smelled.

“And then, when it has been lodged within the earth, when the soil is packed tight about its face as though it were an onion or a radish, why, what then? Why, that is only the beginning of your terrors. For then—and the day will be soon!—the trumpets of Judgment shall sound, and the dead shall be raised, like onions torn up from their bed, and merchant and mason and mother and child shall stand naked before their Judge, with their sins written on their skin as though it were parchment. On the merchant’s skin a dog gnaws a bone as a token of his greed and gluttony, and the Judge surrenders the merchant to the demons waiting to run him through with a spit, like a chicken that’s to be roasted, and then in the undying fires of hell he will be turned on the spit as he screams in endless pain. On the mason’s skin the Judge reads marks of sloth and lechery, and he is given over to the citadel of hell, where through eternity he is crushed by the weight of the stone he must bear up an endless steep incline as jeering demons scourge him with whips. And the mother’s skin is a veritable nest of vipers, as lusts that were invisible writhe up from within and spread across her skin, and she is given over to the demons, and how they deal with her I may not say, though you may all imagine it quite well. And her child that nursed at her breast? What of that child?

That unbaptized child? Its skin is black with the stain of original sin, and that child is forfeited to hell as well, as are all who die unbaptized or unshriven. Without the sacraments, outside the Church, there is no salvation!

This is what Augustine says:
Noli credere, nec dicere, nec docere, infantes ante quam baptizentur morte praeventos posse ad originalium indulgentiam peccatorum, si vis esse catholicus
. Which is to say, Do not believe, or say, or teach that the unbaptized infant can be forgiven original sin—not if you wish to be a Catholic.

“My dear children, this is why heresy must be hunted down and extirpated. This is why there can be no clemency or compromise, for the aim of heresy is nothing less than the destruction of the Church and the triumph of Satan. The heretics would pull us all down to the pit with them, if they could have their way. I have heard some say that the Crusaders were cruel and merciless after the capture of Béziers. That the slaughter of so many of the city’s inhabitants—in fact, of all of them—was merciless and un-Christian.

But against heresy there can be no mercy, not from God, nor yet by God’s deputy here on earth, His Holiness the Pope, in whose name and at whose urging the Crusaders fought. There was opportunity for the citizens to leave Béziers with their Bishop, and that opportunity was refused. And before that they might have surrendered the heretics among themselves, but no, that demand could not be met, for it violated their rights as the
free citizens
of Béziers.”

The Bishop paused to savor the irony of that phrase. He knew there were those among his congregation who had claimed a similar autonomy for the “free citizens” of Montpellier-le-Vieux, who felt that heresy was a sin like other sins, a matter for the conscience and the confessional.

“And so, my dear children, those free
citizens
of Béziers stood upon the ramparts of their city, thinking themselves safe from retribution, and taunted the armies assembled below them and hailed down missiles on the cavalry in their armor and the
routiers
in their rags. But it was those ragged mercenaries who breached the gate and threw into confusion those free
citizens
—but let us call them by their true name— those
contumacious heretics!
And slew them, man, woman, and child! And burned their free city of Béziers to the ground. The very cathedral was sundered in two as a judgment for having sheltered heresy.

“0 my dear children, accept the fate of that city as a warning to yourselves. Surrender your heretics to the Holy Inquisition. You may speak to your confessors in confidence, or if you lack confidence in your confessor, if you fear he may not be zealous, then you may approach the Holy Office directly. If you have but doubts or misgivings concerning a friend, a neighbor, even a relative, share them with us that the cleansing may begin. If you do
not
, if you shirk the hard task now, you may pay a terrible price later, when your shepherd will not be present to protect you.”

The Bishop lifted .his crozier, symbol of his pastoral authority. He scanned the faces of the congregation before him and took note of those whose eyes dared meet his own. Among them were those of Bonamico, the master mason from Lombardy, whom the Bishop knew to be a skeptic and libertine, like so many of his confraternity. Bonamico resented having been impressed into the Bishop’s service, along with some thirty other Lombard workmen who had been employed, at much better wages, in repairing the fortifications of Carcassonne. Their employer, the Viscount of Aude, had not been in a position to gainsay the Bishop’s request, since he was beholden to him for his appointment as the military governor of the newly pacified region. Bonamico’s work had been near completion, in any case. The mason resented his forced service in the construction of Notre Dame de Gevaudon and had twice attempted to flee his obligation, for which the Bishop had been obliged to make an example of him. After these floggings the man’s baleful glare was not to be wondered at. The Bishop did not care about dark looks or mumbled curses, so long as Bonamico and his Lombards accomplished the special, covert task assigned to them. Then he might receive the wages of his insolence.

Nearer the pulpit from which the Bishop regarded his flock was a figure toward whom it was more difficult to maintain an attitude of tolerance and forbearance. Though her face was obscured by a veil of black lace, the Bishop was certain that the eyes of Marquesia de Gaillac, could they be seen, would have shone with an enmity and malice more implacable than Bonamico’s. One of the woman’s daughters had been married to a known Cathar, Jean Cambitor, and the Bishop was quite sure that the faith of Madame de Gaillac was cut from the same heretical cloth. Indeed, he suspected that she was a perftcta—the Cathars, among their other abominations, admitted women into the ranks of their apostate clergy.

Just the sight of the woman, standing before him with every outward sign of respect, infuriated the Bishop, who was stirred thereby to take his homily in a direction he had not planned, telling his flock the instructive story of a certain man of Brabant who discovered the unholy practice of certain midwives who, when they deliver a child, dedicate its life to the devil. The man had hidden himself and seen his own daughter act in this manner in the delivery of his own son, and he’d seen his newly delivered son climbing up the chain by which the cooking pots were suspended. In terror at what he’d seen, the man insisted that his child at once be baptized. When the child was being carried to the next village, where there was a church, they had to cross a bridge. The man would not allow his daughter to carry the child over the bridge but, putting a sword to her throat, insisted that the child must cross the bridge by himself. Being compelled, the midwife put down the child and invoked the devil by her art, and suddenly the child was seen on the other side of the bridge.

The Bishop paused at this point in his remarkable tale to allow its fearful import to be digested. There was much to mull over: the perfidy of women, and of midwives in particular; the extraordinary power of Satan and of those, even infants, dedicated to his service; and—this above all!—the obligation of a good Catholic to prefer the Church’s well-being above his own or his family’s. For the conclusion of the story, as the Bishop now related, was that the man accused both his daughter and his wife before the Inquisition, and the two women, after a period of purgation, were burned at the stake.

Did Madame de Gaillac feel the particular relevance of this tale? Did she shudder within her dark veil? Did she have some premonition that she might share such a fiery fate? Those leagued with the devil sometimes are gifted with second sight, but never in matters touching their own welfare. In these they are blind, or even deceived, for the Father of Lies is impartial in the matter of deception.